As states gear up to administer federal BEAD funds from the bipartisan infrastructure law, a handful of states are already making significant investments in municipal broadband using federal Rescue Plan dollars.

California, Maine, Vermont, and New York have each established grant programs that center municipal broadband projects (mostly fiber builds) – with New York being the most recent state to announce more than $70 million in grant awards through its ConnectALL Municipal Infrastructure Grant Program (MIP).

Courtesy of the U.S. Treasury’s Capital Projects Fund, the awards are part of a $228 million initiative to bring high-quality Internet connectivity and consumer-friendly choice to New York communities long-stranded on the wrong side of the digital divide.

The towns of Dryden and Caroline, New York have been awarded a new $8.9 million broadband grant courtesy of the New York State ConnectALL program. The award will help deliver affordable fiber capable of symmetrical speeds up to 10 gigabits per second (Gbps) to residents of both towns, which until now, had been trapped on the wrong side of the digital divide.

Launched two years ago, Dryden officials have told ISLR they’re making steady inroads on municipally-owned fiber deployment to the town of 14,500. Now they’re looking to expand the popular local broadband network further into the town of nearby Caroline.

According to an announcement by Dryden Fiber, this latest grant award will help fund the construction of over 125 miles of new fiber to reach 2,650 new residences in Dryden and Caroline. The first customers in Caroline are expected to be online sometime within the next twelve months.

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“I find a real partnership between the Town of Dryden, Town of Caroline, and the New York State ConnectALL Office,” Dryden Fiber Executive Director, David Makar says of the award. “Years of hard work and seed planting from elected officials, citizen volunteers, and private partner businesses are now showing up ready to provide top-tier quality broadband service for the residents of Dryden and Caroline.”  

State broadband officials in Massachusetts have announced over $45 million in grant awards from the state’s Broadband Infrastructure Gap Networks Program with the lion’s share going to Verizon to “expand high-speed broadband [I]nternet infrastructure to underserved homes, business, and community anchor institutions across the state.”

State broadband officials say the $45.4 million in grant awards will be coupled with $40 million in matching funds from the awardees to expand broadband access to approximately 2,000 locations in 41 Massachusetts communities.

In 2022, as we previously reported here, Massachusetts was allocated a total of $145 million in federal Rescue Plan dollars to fund the Bay State program. With the state’s first round of funding from the Gap Networks Program awarding $45 million to four applicants, about $100 million is left in the pot for future funding rounds. Massachusetts has yet to receive its $147 million share of federal BEAD funds from the bipartisan infrastructure law, the spending rules for which are much more stringent than the more flexible CPF funding rules.

As the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) is now bankrupt and no longer helping low-income households pay for home Internet service, the City of San Francisco is being honored with the 2024 Community Broadband Project of the Year Award by the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors (NATOA) for its Fiber to Housing (FTH) program.

Built on the back of the city’s municipally-owned fiber optic network – which since 2002 has been used to connect city and public safety facilities, hospitals, libraries and street lights – California’s fourth most populous city is well on its way to extending the city-owned network to deliver free high-speed Internet service to 30,000 affordable housing units across the city.

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The program currently serves over 14,300 affordable housing units in the city, as well as 1,500 beds at homeless shelters across 115 sites, city officials say. An additional 10,000 residential units are expected to be connected in the coming fiscal year, with the aim of serving 30,000 units by July 2025.

According to the city’s website, the program has connected 52 public housing locations across the city to “fiber-optic and Ethernet cabling in every housing unit.” An additional 63 housing locations are getting free Internet through onsite Wi-Fi with download speeds ranging from 60 to 120 Mbps (Megabits per second), which exceeds the 50 Mbps service Comcast’s Internet Essentials offers.

In March, Charter Communications tried (and failed) to include a poison bill in New York State’s budget bill that would have hamstrung community broadband. In stark contrast, a New York legislator this month introduced new legislation he says would make it easier than ever for New York state municipal broadband projects to thrive.

State Senator Jeremy Cooney of Rochester has introduced the Broadband Deployment Assistance Act of 2024 (S9134), which would streamline the permitting process for municipal broadband projects by "amending the general municipal law, in relation to requiring substantially similar permits for broadband deployment to be processed together at the same time and on an expedited basis."

“With a quicker timeline and more efficient process for local governments, we can create affordable options for New Yorkers that empower them to take control of their digital destiny,” Cooney wrote in an editorial published at Syracuse.com.

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Cooney says he was motivated by a lack of broadband competition in New York State. New York is dominated by Charter Communications, which was almost kicked out of the state in 2019 for poor service and  misleading regulators about broadband deployment conditions affixed to its 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable.

On a map, the Crenshaw District is a 2.9 square-mile neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles, home to nearly 30,000 mostly black residents.

In the popular imagination, Crenshaw is the backdrop for the Oscar-nominated movie "Boyz In the Hood" – the real life neighborhood that cultivated the likes of former Los Angeles Mayor Thomas Bradley; rappers-turned-actors Ice Cube and Ice T; and the late rapper/entrepreneur Nipsey Hussle.

But on the streets of Crenshaw, a transformative vision is unfolding – an initiative local leaders describe as “a reparative development project.”

The idea is to inspire and empower neighborhood residents with strategic investments rather than displace them through gentrification. The effort is being led by Destination Crenshaw, a nonprofit community organization established in 2017 to celebrate the history and culture of Black Los Angeles.

The most visible part of the vision is to create the largest Black public art project in the nation along Crenshaw Boulevard, the 1.3 mile spine of the neighborhood – or what Destination Crenshaw describes as an “open air museum” centered around “pocket parks” and a “comprehensive streetscape design” that will feature commissioned murals and sculptures from local Black artists.

Telecom monopolies have hoovered up the lion’s share of $214 million recently doled out by the Pennsylvania state Broadband Infrastructure Program (BIP), with cooperatives, smaller ISPs, and community-owned networks left largely out in the cold.

It’s not a surprising move for a state long considered politically hostile to community-owned and operated broadband networks, though industry experts say this latest round of awards was particularly egregious when it comes to dodgy politics and its total lack of any real transparency.

According to an announcement by the Pennsylvania Broadband Development Authority (PBDA), this $204 million in Broadband Infrastructure Program (BIP) grant awards will help fund 53 projects in 42 counties across Pennsylvania, connecting 40,000 homes and businesses, bringing high-speed Internet to over 100,000 Pennsylvanians.

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The awards were funded with the state’s Capital Projects Fund allocation. After matching funds by winning bidders are included, the total broadband investment is expected to exceed $407 million. A complete breakdown of all grant award winners can be found here.

Verizon was the biggest grant award winner, nabbing $78.3 million. Other big grant award winners were Comcast ($61.7 million), Windstream ($12 million) Frontier ($3.5 million) and Brightspeed ($782,000). A few small private ISPs also won awards including Adams Cable ($387,969) Upward Broadband ($1,476,288) and Alleghenies Broadband ($1,809,524).

Schoharie County, New York officials have applied for a $30 million New York State ConnectALL grant with the hopes of eventually building a $33 million, county-wide fiber network.

The shape and scope of the network has yet to be determined, but the county hopes to build a network that brings affordable access to the rural, agriculture-heavy county.

“Schoharie County applied for the grant under the NYS MIP program on April 19th, in an attempt to bring high speed broadband access to every premise in the county,” Deputy County Administrator Jim Halios told ILSR.

Notoriously over-optimistic FCC data currently states that Schoharie County enjoys 92 percent broadband coverage county-wide. In reality, broadband access in the county is largely dominated by a monopoly enjoyed by Charter Spectrum, which was nearly kicked out of the state entirely in 2019 for misleading regulators and failing to evenly deploy access.

Advocates for better Internet access are breathing a sigh of relief in New York as the State Assembly passed a budget bill yesterday that did not include an amendment that would have undermined the state’s municipal broadband grant program.

As we reported last month, buried in language near the bottom of the Assembly budget proposal was a Trojan horse legislative sources said was being pushed by lobbyists representing Charter Spectrum.

The amendment, which did not survive the budget reconciliation process, proposed to limit Municipal Infrastructure Program grants to projects that targeted “unserved and underserved locations only” – a restriction that would have made municipal broadband projects in the state less likely to become financially viable.

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Created as part of New York’s billion dollar ConnectALL Initiative, the MIP is specifically designed to support municipal broadband projects. Such projects are routinely targeted by lobbyists for the big monopoly providers intent on preventing any competition to their often spotty, high-cost service offerings.

*In partnership with Broadband Breakfast, we occasionally republish each other's content. The following story by Broadband Breakfast Reporter Jericho Casper was originally published here.

In a setback to efforts aimed at enhancing broadband access across Wisconsin, the state Senate dealt a blow to three key bills aimed at improving various aspects of broadband provision Monday.

The first bill in question, AB 1180, aimed to give local governments more autonomy by allowing them to apply for broadband grants directly, rather than requiring them to partner with a telecommunications utility or a for-profit organization, as is required under current (state) law.

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The bill also proposed expanding the permissible uses of grants beyond infrastructure construction and would have eliminated a requirement for a city, village, or town to prepare a feasibility report before constructing or operating facilities for public telecommunications, cable TV or broadband services.

Presently, Wisconsin law necessitates a public hearing before a local government can pass an ordinance or resolution to provision such facilities. Additionally, at least 30 days before this hearing, these entities must furnish a comprehensive report to the public, detailing the facility's costs, revenues, and a cost-benefit analysis spanning three years. AB 1180 would have waived the need for this report preparation.

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